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Groping in the dark to the old cookstove, Mike raked together the handful of pitch-pine shavings which he had whittled that morning for his dinner fire. He reached up to the shelf where the matches were kept, lighted the shavings, laid them carefully in the firebox and fed the little blaze with dry splinters.
He was vigorously polishing the cookstove on this Wednesday evening and they were cheerfully talking and joking, when the sound of bootheels on the side porch announced the coming of visitors. "Oh, dear me! who can that be?" whispered Janice. "Save me, My Lady save me!" cried daddy, appearing to be very much frightened, and dodging behind the stove.
There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner.
To my mother, in her perplexity over the cookstove, the woman who showed her how to make the fire was an angel of deliverance.
He was listlessly brushing up the cottage kitchen. Lottie had fallen asleep on the wide bench beyond the cookstove, a great bunch of posies hugged against her stained pinafore. "Come in and see, sir," said Janice, beckoning the gray man into the store. Drugg came with shuffling steps and lack-lustre eyes.
He was purple with mortification, and leered up at Johnnie murderously. "Ha! ha! Y' got enough?" Johnnie inquired. He was all of a glow now, and his face fairly shone. But he was not done with the tyrant. A sense of long-outraged justice made him hand Barber the big, black, three-legged, iron kettle that belonged on the back of the cookstove.
The door beside the cookstove swung wide, and Cis came hurrying in from the tiny, windowless closet this her "own room" where she had been listening anxiously. "Oh, Mr. Barber," she began, trying to keep her young voice from trembling, "this week can I have enough out of my wages for some more shoe-whitening?" There were several ways in which to take Big Tom's mind from any subject.
And while he was doing it his fellows conducted the beef, on ten thousand legs, from the South to the North. They took them North so that they would put on fat under the stimulus of a Northern winter. In those days he engineered the peculiar cookstove which we have already noticed. It was a big, square, sheet-iron stove with an iron axle and wheels like those of a sulky plow.
Just ahead stood Cookstove, its rocky crest bathed in the morning light, while far away to the north the sharper outlines were lost in a great army of evergreens, which seemed to be trooping restlessly up the hill and descending again into the great unknown of the valley.
Breakfast was the latest, and the smell of coffee and fried pork still hung about the room. There were two Windsor chairs, one of which his wife was occupying, and a ramshackle food cupboard. Then there were the cookstove and a fuel box, and two or three iron pots hanging about the walls.
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